honor I took it for a castle, and a considerable one too; but if it be
an inn, and not a castle, all I have to say is, that you must excuse
me from paying anything; for I would by no means break the laws which
we knights-errant are bound to observe; nor was it ever known, that
they ever paid in any inn whatsoever; for this is the least recompense
that can be allowed them for the intolerable labors they endure day
and night, winter and summer, on foot and on horseback, pinched with
hunger, choked with thirst, and exposed to all the injuries of the air
and all the inconveniences in the world."--"I have nothing to do with
all this," cried the innkeeper; "pay your reckoning, and don't trouble
me with your foolish stories of a cock and a bull; I can't afford to
keep house at that rate."--"Thou art both a fool and a knave of an
innkeeper," replied Don Quixote, and with that clapping spurs to
Rozinante, and brandishing his javelin at his host, he rode out of the
inn without any opposition, and got a good way from it, without so
much as once looking behind him to see whether his squire came after
him.

The knight being marched off, there remained only the squire, who was
stopped for the reckoning. However, he swore he would not pay a cross;
for the selfsame law that acquitted the knight acquitted the squire.
This put the innkeeper into a great passion, and made him threaten
Sancho very hard, telling him if he would not pay him by fair means,
he would have him laid by the heels that moment. Sancho swore by his
master's knighthood he would sooner part with his life than his money
on such an account; nor should the squires in after ages ever have
occasion to upbraid him with giving so ill a precedent, or breaking
their rights.

As ill luck would have it, there happened to be in the inn four
Segovia clothiers, three Cordova pointmakers, and two Seville
hucksters, all brisk, gamesome, roguish fellows; who agreeing all in
the same design, encompassed Sancho, and pulled him off his ass, while
one of them went and got a blanket. Then they put the unfortunate
squire into it, and observing the roof of the place they were in to be
somewhat too low for their purpose, they carried him into the back
yard, which had no limits but the sky, and there they tossed him for
several times together in the blanket, as they do dogs on Shrove
Tuesday. Poor Sancho made so grievous an outcry all the while that his
master heard him, and imagined those l